Minor counties of English and Welsh cricket

The Minor Counties are the cricketing counties of England and Wales that are not afforded first-class status. The game is administered by the Minor Counties Cricket Association which comes under the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). There are currently twenty teams in minor county cricket: nineteen representing historic counties of England, plus the Wales Minor Counties Cricket Club. Of the thirty nine historic counties of England, seventeen have a first class county cricket team (the eighteenth first class county is Glamorgan in Wales), nineteen have a minor county team, while Huntingdonshire, Rutland, and Westmorland have neither.

The last three counties all have associations with another county; Huntingdonshire with Cambridgeshire, Rutland with Leicestershire and Westmorland with Cumberland. Huntingdonshire is sometimes considered one of the Minor Counties because even though it has never played within the Minor Counties Championship it has its own individual Cricket Board and played in the English domestic one-day competition, between the years 1999 and 2003. The Isle of Wight, historically a part of Hampshire but now a county in its own right, also has its own individual Cricket Board and has aspirations to play as a Minor County in the future.

History

The Minor Counties not accorded first-class status formed their own Championship from 1895. In the early years, the results of matches against teams playing insufficient games to qualify for the final table, were...
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